Former Vice President Al Gore has a must-read editorial in the New York Times on climate change. His summary of the attacks on climate science, legislative failure in U.S. Senate, and diplomatic failures in Copenhagen is straightforward, clear-eyed, and quietly forceful. Read it.
His opening line says what we will all wish were true.
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
The reality is that the overwhelming weight of evidence points to recent global temperatures unequaled in the current interglacial period and disturbing changes in our environment consistent with this warming trend.
For the "skeptics" who turn to meteorologists and corporate-sponsored disinformation websites, stolen emails and a few mistakes in a 1200-page report are sufficient to demand that nothing be done to address climate change. Senator Inhofe even wants to channel Joseph McCarthy to intimidate climate scientists. The critical mass of stupid is quickly being reached.
Gore addresses the situation with a clarity that I wish more of our elected officials were capable of.
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
In essence, the human race is engaged in an extraordinary experiment. We are dumping ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and hoping that the oceans and vegetation can continue to absorb enough of it to keep radiant heating to a comfortable minimum. So far, that experiment does not seem to be working very well as ecosystem changes are being found from pole to pole.
Gore notes why we have to lead. Climate change "skeptics" demand we follow others. We do nothing until China or India change their behavior first.
This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.
Blue Dogs and Republicans are living with a delusion that the free-market will fix all things. Never mind that the market is never free as corporate interests push politicians to rig markets in their favor.
The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.
Gore even points to the Fox and friends corporate echo chamber that has replaced investigative journalism.
Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.
For someone who has been personally attacked with remarkable venom for the past decade, he manages to rise above the fray and focus on issues. His conclusion is something we need to take to heart.
Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.
Gore is optimistic that climate bill framework being pursued by John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham will bear fruit. The rumors seem to indicate that the cap and trade portion of that framework is dead and the bill will be nothing but an energy bill with enough dirty incentives to appeal to conservatives. The effectiveness of such an approach is extremely limited, but I am glad is Gore is still an effective voice for real change.
Update: I see that the diary made the Rec list. Many, many thanks to all that read, recommended, and commented.